dick | N4BC

60 Meters and upgrades

Sixty meters is an odd band. Last night, I worked a station in Paducah, KY, and a station in Poland. I was being heard in both North America and Europe. Sixty is still an underutilized band, but I’m finding more and more users.

Forty last night was hot! Solid wall to wall FT-8 and CW signals … strong, too! I upgraded Windows 10 with the big Spring 2018 update with only one minor problem … when I opened WSJT-X it would key the transmitter, but there was no output power. I suspected an audio problem, and I was right. For some reason, the audio source changed from USB Audio Codec to Speaker in the WSJT-X Audio setup screen. Two mouse clicks pretty much solved that. No more problems noted and all works OK now.

I read an interesting article last night (don’t remember where, though … somewhere on the internet). Seems the scientist was saying that the new sunspot cycle has just begun. Something to do with the change in polarity of a new sunspot. If this is true, it would make the last cycle one of the shortest. We can only hope …

Spring has sprung, it seems. We’re finally having days in the 70s and 80s. Nights are still pretty cool … in the 40s and 50s. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time!

73 de Dick N4BC

Casual Evening

Last night, I worked Guadeloupe on 80M. That was a new one on that band for me. I even found a couple of stations on 15M, too … Clint, NW5P in Texas, and WP4AZT, Jose, in Puerto Rico. All in all, a nice evening, playing on the radio. I’m going to try and get a 40M inverted vee up this weekend, and see if that works any better than my non-resonant vertical.

73 de Dick N4BC

Decent Signals …

This past weekend was terrible for signals, but things seem to have picked up somewhat. Here’s a snapshot of last night:

I even had some action on 15 meters and 60 meters. Almost all of my contacts were with North American stations.

The weather has become more springlike lately. The birds are singing, the pollen is falling, and the weeds are sprouting. I think it’s time for some antenna attention. It’s raining today, but later this week I need to get out into the back yard and check antenna connections, coax, and matching networks to make sure everything survived the winter OK. I’m thinking of putting up another 40M inverted vee, since 40 is looking to be a workhorse during this part of the sunspot cycle. The inverted vees have always performed well for me.

I also want to get out and do some portable parks work, too. I’m at the age when sitting in the cold, sleety outdoors with a thirty mile per hour wind whistling around my ears is not fun, so the warmer, more hospitable climate is very welcome.

73 de Dick N4BC

A Weird One …

I worked an odd callsign last night … 9A18WARD. The 9A1 part tells me it’s Croatia, but you have to admit, it’s a weird call. I can’t find any info on QRZ or searching on Google, other than lots of people have worked that station.

Oh, well … work ’em first and worry about them later. Have a great weekend!

73 de Dick N4BC

Embarrassed

I sat down and took some on-line amateur licensing exams, just for kicks. Well, I passed the Tech with flying colors. I think I missed one question, and that was from not reading the question correctly. The General was a bit harder. Let’s just say that I passed … and not by a great margin. The Extra was another story, however. I missed 16 questions, and the maximum allowed is 13 … ABYSMAL FAILURE!!! And … I just flat-out guessed at some of the answers I got right. It was embarrassing!

So, the moral of this story is … don’t get too smug if you’ve been licensed for a long time. The knowledge set has really changed since I tested for Extra in 1993. Lots more satellite and solid state theory than I remember. And I still .work full-time in the world of radio communications!

You know what this is going to do, don’t you? It’s going to drive me to spend some time boning up on Extra-class theory. I guess that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

73 de Dick N4BC